I'm an immigrant born in Peru and raised from childhood in the United States. Art was always my unique way of finding personal fulfillment and joy, and I enjoyed the labor of creating art as much as the reward of completing a piece. Art helped me understand the world around me, paying attention to minute details and figuring out how to capture them, what media to use, etc. As an immigrant child and later adolescent, my budget was always a significant limit to what I could create, including a scarcity of printer paper of all things, so I learned to find creative (zero-budget) solutions. Eventually, as a sixth-grader at East Haven Academy, my passion for art, as well as the support and kindness from my peers and educators, led to me receiving the CT State Art Award in 2006, a great honor for a little guy. I never pursued art professionally in high school or beyond -- which may surprise many of my past connections -- but I like to think that my passion for creating art has never dwindled, and that the lessons I learned from making art pushed me to greater success in life. For example, when approaching a new composition, especially drawing from real life, one can feel overwhelmed very quickly. Yet, an important lesson that I abstracted from those experiences is that where there is a challenge, artistic or otherwise, one can also make a strategy to address it. In college and beyond, I continued down a science path, studying neuroscience. Always, I've thought of myself as an artist in these fields, a mindset that pushes me to create and improvise, and I think everyone has an artist in themselves.
